


Scavengers

by missmissa85



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015), Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Ben Solo Needs A Hug, F/M, Oneshot for now, TLJ Spoilers, ben solo makes good decisions, spoilers for episode viii
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-01
Updated: 2018-01-01
Packaged: 2019-02-26 07:45:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,217
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13231170
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/missmissa85/pseuds/missmissa85
Summary: On the night Kylo Ren was created, Ben Solo listens to another voice and makes different decisions. Some things, however, are written in the stars, and he finds himself in the debt of a young scavenger.





	Scavengers

**Author's Note:**

> So, another fic I read that I can't remember the name of, had a moment of Rey thinking about other possible lives she could have had with Ben. One of them had her picturing them living a life on Jakku. I wrote this in response to that single line of inspiration.

He coughed and sputtered as he stumbled from the wreckage of his hut. His arms were bleeding and the sharpness he felt with every breath told him at least one of his ribs was broken.

His master-his uncle-had just tried to murder him while he slept. Ben felt his grasp on reality slipping as he dragged his feet across the ground.  He tightened his grip on his lightsaber just to feel something solid in his hands.

_You have been betrayed_ , said a rasping voice in his head.  _Take your revenge.  Do it now._

He had been hearing the voice for months, since the news of his mother and uncle’s true parentage reached his ears, though not from her lips.  She had kept it secret and it angered Ben deeply.  He wasn't even sure if the voice was coming from outside his own mind, or if it was just an expression of his own anger.

_Ben_ , said another voice, deeper, softer, and kinder.  _Ben, don’t give in to hate._

The kind voice was new, but somehow familiar, and he found himself trusting it more.

“Ben!  Ben, what did you do?”

He instinctively pushed Kanea, a fellow padawan, away with the Force.  Several voices soon joined hers and several lightsabers ignited in their wake.

_Fight, boy!_

_Run, Ben!  Run!_

He had only a moment to consider which voice he should listen to.  His lightsaber remained unlit in his hand, and he ran as fast as his long legs could carry him, though his lungs protested with every step.

He skidded into the sparsely populated shipyard and jumped up the ladder to his uncle’s X-Wing.  He barely fit in the cockpit, but he quickly went through the preflight checks.

“Ben, you brought a house down on our master!” Temi, a Twi’Lek trainee Ben would have called a friend, yelled up at him, his lightsaber drawn.  “Why?”

“He was going to kill me,” Ben shouted down, quietly cycling the engines.  “I defended myself.”

“Master Luke would never do that!”

“He was afraid of the Dark Side that lives in me because it lives in him as well,” Ben said.  “Let me go, Temi.”

The blue-skinned Twi’Lek seemed to consider for a moment before he nodded solemnly.  “Go!” he shouted up, turning on the oncoming group of padawans.

Ben punched the engines and the old craft burst to life and left the ground.  He looked down to see Temi fighting off the other padawans.  His heart clenched in his chest.

_You are not responsible for the decisions of another_ , the kind voice told him. _Go! Now!_

The old vessel shook as he broke through the atmosphere into open space.  He was suddenly very aware that he had no idea what he should do next.  Run, yes, but where was the greater question.  His parents wouldn’t understand.  They probably wouldn’t even believe him, assuming he could find both of them.  He might be their son, but Luke Skywalker was a Jedi Master and their greatest friend.  Ben had nowhere to go.

_Come to_ me _, boy, and I will show you the true power of the Force_.

The voice that had courted him for months resounded in his head again.  It was true he had nowhere else to go, and he did still need a teacher.  A series of loud and frantic beeps filled the cockpit and broke Ben from his reverie before he could consider it further.

“Artoo?” Ben asked.  “What are you doing in here?”

The ancient screen that translated for the droid shorted out and Ben only caught about every other word of Artoo’s explanatory tirade.

“I’m running for my life, okay?” Ben yelled in response.  “Are you going to help me, or are you going to be a lump of dead weight?”

He wasn’t entirely sure what the droid’s response was, but he was sure it was begrudgingly foul.

“Just get me out of here, okay?”

Despite his obvious displeasure, Artoo programmed the navicomputer, and Ben was jolted into the seat as the hyperdrive engines screamed to life.

* * *

 

It had been a day like any other she had marked off on the walls of her little home.  She almost didn’t hear the sound, it was so far away.  But she ducked outside and saw the trail of smoke from a falling craft.  She mounted her speeder bike and headed the direction of the smoke.  The old X-Wing was still smoking when she arrived.  She would have to wait before attempting to salvage anything.  Then she saw movement.  She rushed over to see a lank, young man struggling to release an astromech from the ship.  Blood was running down his face and his legs gave out, leaving him to collapse into the sand.

“Hey! Hey, are you all right?” she asked, kneeling next to him.

His eyes fluttered and his mouth moved uselessly for a moment before he managed, “Help.  Help him.”

She looked up and found where the manual release should have been.  It had been crushed to worthlessness.  The astromech screamed expletives as she scaled the hull to reach the wires of the release.  Balancing carefully, she tied two wires together and the droid dropped to the desert floor, screaming as he rolled away.

She jumped down.  “Sorry!” she called out to the angry droid before kneeling once again at the young man’s side.  “You, can you walk? Your ship may catch fire. We need to go.”

“Go,” he rasped. “I’m not worth…just go.”

She shook her head.  “No, don’t talk like that.  You’re too big for me to move.  You have to help me.  What’s your name?”

_His name is Ben!_ the droid screamed from its place down the slope.

“Ben?” she asked gently.  “Ben, get up.  I need to you to help me.  Ben!”

His brown eyes focused on her, and he wearily said, “Are you an Angel?”

She shook her head, a slight smile gracing her lips.  “No. I’m just Rey.  Now. Get. Up.”

They were slow and Ben’s height made him an unwieldy burden; not to mention the fact that he wasn’t wearing any sort of shoes.  But she eventually secured both him and Artoo, as she learned the droid was called, to her speeder bike. Ben was very nearly unconscious by the time she returned to her shelter.  She surprised herself at managing to get him inside.  Artoo screeched in protest at being left outside, but hauling in Ben was the best she could do.

His breathing was shallow and irregular.  She pulled away his bloody and tattered tunic. His chest was bruised, and she felt along his side until she found the broken rib.  He hissed in pain as her fingers brushed over the spot.

“We’ll take care of that last, then,” she told him gently.

She took a cloth and dipped it into her meager water supply.  She washed the blood from his face and the scrapes on his arms and legs.  She found one of his legs was broken as well.  She knew how to fix that and set if before he could even protest, although he screamed as the bones snapped back into place.  She used a supply of antiseptic she kept on hand to finish cleaning his wounds and found some cloth she could use to bandage his ribcage.

“I think you’ll need to sit up for this bit,” she told him quietly.

“No,” he rasped, pushing her hand away.

“If I don’t tie it off, it could puncture your lung and you could die.”

“No,” he said again, pushing her away.

The air in the room seemed to shift.  Rey felt something change, though nothing about the room physically altered.  She heard a small pop, and then Ben drew in a deep breath.

“Thank you,” he said, breathing deeply.  “Thank you, Rey.”

“You’re welcome,” Rey replied quietly, brushing hair from his sweaty brow.

* * *

 

Ben had no idea how long his fever dream lasted.  It could have been days, or weeks, he couldn’t tell.  He did remember when the heat faded and a deep cold settled in his bones.  He remembered shivering so violently, he thought his recently cracked bones would come undone.  And then he felt the press of warm flesh to his bare back and arms wrapped around his chest.  A warmth that came from some place other than flesh filled him, and he breathed deeply as he fell into a dreamless sleep.

He groaned and blinked as the bright sunlight filtered into the dark shelter.  He recalled the moment the engine suddenly gave out and the ship was thrust from hyperspace.  He only barely managed to control the crash as they hurtled through the atmosphere of some planet.  He remembered scrambling from the cockpit and struggling to get Artoo out. Then he remembered a pair of blue eyes and a kind, though insistent voice.

“I thought you would never wake up,” the insistent voice said as the girl—he could see now she was only about sixteen—came into the metal box.  “Here, drink this.”

He did not realize how parched he was until the offered cup of water touched his throat.  “I’m sorry,” he said, returning the cup to her.  “I know you told me, but I don’t remember your name.”

“I’m Rey.”

“I’m Ben.”

“I know,” she replied.  “I wasn’t dying when you told me _your_ name.”

Ben smirked.  “I don’t think I was dying.”

“Matter of opinion,” she replied flatly.

He started to move and then suddenly became keenly aware that he was naked save for the thin sheet covering him from the waist down.  “Um, what happened to my clothes?”

“I cleaned them and mended them,” she said, retrieving the folded pile from the corner.  “Had to find you some shoes.  The ones I salvaged from the wreckage of the ship you crashed would never have fit you.  Who did you steal the ship from?”

A screeching reply came from outside the walls of the shelter.

“I guess that means you got Artoo out,” Ben muttered.

“Why did you steal your uncle’s ship?” Rey asked.

Ben took a deep breath.  He hadn’t considered what he would say to anyone he met.  He couldn’t tell the truth, and yet he knew completely lying to this girl would likely be a fruitless endeavor.  There weren’t that many T-65s left in the galaxy, and it probably had Luke’s Rogue Squadron leader insignia painted on somewhere.

“He was going to kill me,” Ben told her finally.  “I fought him off and ran away.  It was the first ship I found.”

Her gaze narrowed toward him.  “Why was he trying to kill you?”

Ben glared at her.  He knew why he found his uncle standing over him with an ignited lightsaber.  Luke was a Jedi.  There was no way he hadn’t felt the pull to the Dark in Ben’s soul.  He hadn’t had the time to question why his uncle would choose to kill him instead of talking to him.  He just reacted, and he wasn’t sure if that put him in the wrong.

“You’d have to ask my uncle,” Ben replied with a sigh. “I didn’t hurt him or threaten him.  I suppose he was just afraid.”

Rey shrugged.  “Well, you are very big,” she said with a smirk.

Ben rolled his eyes, but still managed a chuckle.  “I am much taller than my uncle.  I may be taller than my father now.”

She raised an eyebrow at him.  “You don’t know?”

“I haven’t seen him in person since I was twelve,” he explained, picking at the pile of clothes in his hands.  “Um…would you mind.”

“You realize I took the clothes off of you, right?”

He felt his cheeks begin to burn.  “Uh, yeah, but…I’m awake now,” he said lamely.

“Hmm,” she said, rising and stepping out of the shelter.

Ben breathed a sigh of relief when she was gone.  As he gingerly got dressed, he took in his surroundings.  He was in some sort of metal container.  Sand had drifted in at some point, though she had set up a barrier to keep more from coming in. There was something familiar about the shape of the shelter, though he couldn’t quite place it. On a shelf, he found a Rebel pilot’s helmet, much like the one his uncle had given Ben to play with when he was small and a doll made from the remnants of a fighter pilot’s uniform. He found himself most transfixed, however, by the hash marks in the wall. He wondered what she was marking off. There were hundreds of lines of waiting on the walls.

After so much movement, he felt the sharp pains of his broken leg and the ache residing in his rib cage. He breathed deep and opened himself to the Force.  He had pushed his rib back into place out of sheer desperation.  Knitting the marrow and tendons back into place required more focus.

_You should be more powerful than this,_ the unkind voice sneered in his head.  _You should have the power to never feel pain_.

“Get out of my head!”

He slammed his fists and the walls rattled. The ragged doll looked up at him from the sandy floor and he bent to pick it up.

“Are you insane?”

Ben looked up at her.  She was standing in the doorway holding a metal staff fashioned from the exhaust port of a mid-sized freighter.  She was younger than him, and smaller, but he knew frightening her in her own home would not end well for him.

“I don’t think I am,” he told her, struggling to stand and straining not to hit his head on the ceiling.  “I’m sorry.”

He replaced the doll on the shelf and she took a cautious step toward him.  She reached out an arm and said, “Come on.  Fresh air will do you good.”

Ben managed a smile and leaned on her as he limped out of the doorway.  He had to blink several times before his eyes adjusted to the bright, desert sun.  Glancing around, he saw that Rey’s shelter was the fallen carcass of an old AT-AT.  He slowly slunk to the ground and said, “What planet are we on?”

“Jakku,” she replied, handing him a piece of fruit she produced from a nearby satchel and sitting down next to him.

“Huh.  That explains this then,” he said, motioning toward legs of the walker.

“It must have been a large battle,” she mused.  “There’s a downed Star Destroyer not far from here.  A lot of X-Wings like the one you crashed.  A few pieces of droids like him.”

Ben looked over at Artoo wobbling on his now-mismatched feet and attempting to zap some sort of lizard.  “There are no droids like Artoo.”

The droid in question stopped his zapping and beeped appreciatively.

Ben rolled his eyes.  “You’re welcome,” he muttered.  “The Empire thought this would be a good place to make a last stand,” Ben said to Rey, peeling back the skin of the fruit in his hands.  “It was for a while.  It took the Republic an absurd amount of time to decide whether or not to send in troops.”

She narrowed her gaze toward him.  “How do you know any of this?  It was nearly twenty years ago, and you can’t possibly be old enough to remember it.”

“I’m not,” he confirmed.  “My mother was pregnant with me during the Battle of Jakku.  If she hadn’t been, she probably would have been here.  Mind telling me how you got jogun fruit out here?”

He thought he had never tasted anything sweeter or more satisfying at that moment.  It occurred to him that he honestly did not know the last time he had eaten.

“I’ve done very well salvaging your ship,” she informed him, indelicately sucking the juice her own jogun.  “There was no repairing the ship, in case you’re wondering.  I wouldn’t have started salvaging if there had been a chance to fix it.”

Ben shook his head.  “You saved my life.  You can do whatever you want with my uncle’s ship.”

He so hungrily ate his fruit that he did not see her staring at him with a smiling look of awe for a few minutes.  He felt her eyes and turned his head to meet them.  “What?” he asked.

“I didn’t save your life.”

“Obviously, you did.”

She shook her head.  “The biggest threat to your life was the broken rib.  It could have snapped and filled your lungs with blood, but you put it back in place.  You didn’t even use your hands.”

“I,” he hesitated, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Rey’s smile became sly.  She reached into the satchel where the fruit had been and said, “I don’t suppose you could tell me what this is either.”

She was holding his lightsaber.  He instinctively reached for it, and she jerked it away, out of his reach with his broken leg.

_Take what is yours!_

“You will give that to me,” Ben snarled, summoning the Force to bend her will to his.  He almost physically fell backward at the wall of resistance that was simply…her.

She glared at him.  “No.”

His resolve crumbled under her icy, blue stare.  “It’s my life,” he whispered, repeating a speech he had once been given.  “It’s an extension of who I am.  I sought out its heart, and it found me.  It’s my lightsaber.”

Her lips parted and her mouth and eyes formed a shocked expression.  She wordlessly passed the cylinder to him, and he sighed in relief as he leaned back from her face.  The casing was seemingly unharmed and the metal was remarkably cool in his hands.

“A lightsaber is a Jedi weapon,” Rey said suddenly, pulling Ben back to the present.  “Are you a Jedi?”

Ben was afraid of Rey’s question mostly because he did not know the answer.  Jedi did not kill their masters in fits of panic.  They did not try to force young women to their will.  They did not hide in fear.

_You know what you are, boy!_

He closed his eyes and tried to find all the all of the Light left within himself.

_Ben_.

He opened his eyes to the kind voice he had first heard at the temple. A blue-hued young man in Jedi robes with wild hair was standing next to Artoo, a hand on the droid’s shell.  The face was somehow familiar, though Ben could not put a name to it.

“Ben,” the man said, a smile crossing his scarred face, “you know who you are.”

“Ben?  Ben, did you hear me?”

This time it was Rey speaking.  The blue-hued man was gone, but so was the rasping, unkind presence Ben had felt in his mind for months.  He almost laughed, but that would have made him appear even more insane than he already certainly did.

“I don’t know what I am,” he answered truthfully, setting his lightsaber aside.  “I just know what I will never be: someone’s puppet.”

She snorted and giggled, and Ben’s eyebrows knit together in confusion at that reaction.  “You’re so dramatic,” Rey told him.  “Life here is much simpler.  We survive until the next day comes.”

Ben returned her smile.  “Simple sounds nice.”

**Author's Note:**

> One of the most interesting things about the novel, Bloodline, was that it was set a mere six years before The Force Awakens. In the novel, the galaxy, including Ben, discover Luke and Leia's true parentage. What this basically means is that Ben's transformation into Kylo Ren happened less than six years before the events of the Sequel Trilogy. Side note: isolation and perceived failure REALLY aged Luke. Anyway, in addition to making a total canon divergence, I'm also fiddling with Ben and Rey's ages a bit as well.  
> Thanks for reading!


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